It is now commonplace for consumers (or clients or customers or shoppers or buyers) to purchase goods or products from on-line (or e-commerce or Internet-based) retailers (or merchants). A large number of on-line retailers have set up on-line Internet web sites where consumers can shop for the products (or items or goods) that are available for sale, purchase the products desired and have the products delivered to them. These products may be tangible goods, such as groceries, books, CDs, DVDs, tools, clothes, footwear, health/beauty items, hardware, or any other tangible goods that are physically delivered to the customer, or “digital” goods, such as electronic books, music, movies/videos, application software, or any other digital product that is downloaded, copied, transmitted or otherwise electronically transferred to the customer.
To find a desired product to purchase, a customer will often perform a search using search tools available on a merchant website. The search results are typically displayed as a list of products that are related in some way to the search criteria. The customer then selects (or clicks on) a desired product in the list, which causes the website to display details of the selected product, including the product specifications, characteristics, features and/or images of the product. After reviewing the product details, the customer may either buy the product or return to the search results list to select another product to review. If there are two or more products that have similar features, the customer must typically either remember which product has which features, print out a copy of a feature list for each product being compared, or switch back and forth between product detail screens to compare the products. This comparison/selection process can be cumbersome and inefficient and often leads to buyer frustration that may greatly diminish the on-line shopping experience. Further, buyer frustration increases the likelihood that the customer may look to another on-line merchant as the source of products in the future.
Further, the search tools often include pull-down menus or other types of selection devices wherein one or more options are offered each pertaining to a certain feature of the products being reviewed. Typically, a user can select one of the available options thereby causing a display of the available products including only those products having the feature identified by the user selection. If the user decides he/she would like to look at those products having a second one of the selectable features, the product selection tool must again be used to select the option corresponding to the second feature whereby the display is updated to include only those available products having the second feature. To compare the products resulting from the searches having the first and second options respectively, a user would need to print out the various search results or flip back and forth between the windows corresponding to the respective searches.
Similarly, many currently used websites provide search tools directed to the price ranges of available products. Typically such price range selectors display a list of increasing/decreasing price ranges which are user selectable to review all of the available products in the selected price range. For example, price ranges selectors usually offer selectable ranges of prices such as: 0-$50, $50-$100, $100-$200, etc., or similar incrementally increasing or decreasing ranges of prices which are separately selectable. Thus, in this example, if a user wants to review all of the available products less than $200, he/she must separately select each of the above-identified options and separately review the products displayed in each price range in subsequently displayed windows.
Therefore, the current techniques for assisting on-line shoppers when various related items on a list need to be reviewed and compared can be inefficient, frustrating and lead to lost sales and loss of repeat business for the merchant. Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system or method for assisting shoppers that overcomes the limitations and inefficiencies of the conventional approaches, that among other potential benefits provides a more efficient way of displaying search results and/or makes it more convenient and efficient to purchase goods on-line when the customer desires to compare various products before making a purchase, thereby improving the on-line shopping experience with the on-line merchant.